Factorio Forums

I agree with the OP (original poster) that it would be important to increase the precision of the displayed values to 3 significant digits.

However, I'm not sure if reducing the font size would be the right thing to do. On the other hand, I have no better suggestion.

Rseding91 wrote:Rendering individual letters different sizes has a large amount of overhead and code complexity since each new letter size needs to be prepared as a font before it can be rendered. Meaning: different sized letters is not likely to ever happen.

When I've run into this I've created a font that artificially made the period smaller. So you're still loading just one font, but the period character is smaller.

Zavian wrote:I don't see any reason to go beyond 3 significant figures in the production screen, certainly not enough to justify developer time on another option

The problem with 2 significant figures is that for a value of 1.0k, it's somewhere between 1000 and 1099. That is a 9.9% uncertainty. (9.999% if the value is averaged over time, or for production values of 1.0m). 10% is a large uncertainty. Moving to 3 significant figures always would make the max uncertainty 1%, which in my mind is good enough.

Wouldn't 1.0k mean between 1000 and 1049 ?
(With 999 being displayed fully, and 1050 being rounded to 1.1k...)

P.S.:
Why though production numbers get 4 significant digits between 100.0 and 999.9, and only "3" (counting the k) - above?

BlueTemplar wrote:Wouldn't 1.0k mean between 1000 and 1049 ?
(With 999 being displayed fully, and 1050 being rounded to 1.1k...)

No; Factorio rounds down, not to nearest. 1050-1099 is rounded to 1.0k, 1100-1199 is rounded to 1.1k, and so forth. Factorio's always-round-down rule is one reason you don't occasionally see 1000 instead of 1.0k. (Some games round 999.5-999.9 up to 1000, and round 1000-1049.9 down to 1.0k.)

Ah, I guess that it truncates - because it's less computationally intensive ?

BlueTemplar wrote:Ah, I guess that it truncates - because it's less computationally intensive ?

It's the same cost either way. But having a GUI show "you're producing 1000 blue science a minute" when you're actually producing 901 would be very misleading.

BlueTemplar wrote:Why though production numbers get 4 significant digits between 100.0 and 999.9, and only "3" (counting the k) - above?

Whilst the k is a 3rd character it is not a significant figure.

Rseding91 wrote:

BlueTemplar wrote:Ah, I guess that it truncates - because it's less computationally intensive ?

It's the same cost either way. But having a GUI show "you're producing 1000 blue science a minute" when you're actually producing 901 would be very misleading.

It should be 950+, not 901+. Also, I think that a more accurate number in a tooltip could be a good idea (as someone suggested above).

bump

+1 for 3 s.f. ALL times!

i can tell the difference between 999.1 and 999.2, but not 1000 and 1099? not happy

in the mean time, is there any work around (mods or command etc)?

When designing plants in creative mode, I generally want to ensure optimal production for some configuration. For low numbers, you can check whether production matches the statistics in the [p] screen. However, for numbers >1k it goes into scientific notation, meaning we can't see whether we're producing as many green circuits as we should.

Suggestion: Make a configurable option (or a lua-only option, if necessary) to disable scientific notation or set the amount of digits.

Quite related suggestion : viewtopic.php?f=6&t=58578 (different solution for the same issue).

Well I agree that that suggestion is a great idea, but it seems that my fellow Dutchman wants to improve on overall factory balancing and throughput, whereas my suggestion is aimed at optimizing single designs...

(also, his suggestion seems like quite a GUI challenge, while my suggestion should be a relatively easy option of allowing 1, 2, or 3 digits. But that's up to the devs I suppose )

Also related viewtopic.php?f=6&t=62110 .

TL;DR

It would be awesome to have a way to view the exact value of a given signal when the value is above 1000.

What ?

Currently, whenever circuit network signals are above 1000, they are abbreviated as 1.0k. While in most cases this is a great display option, I believe it might be beneficial to have a way to toggle the way these numbers are displayed so that it can show its actual complete value instead of the abbreviated 1.0k format.

Why ?

Troubleshooting circuit network can be very difficult when dealing with large numbers. A value of 1012 and 1099 will be displayed as 1.0k. So, if you have a check in a decider combinator which has a condition of "value greater than 1050" then, troubleshooting issues becomes difficult since there are no way to view the actual value instead of the formatted 1.0k value. It becomes a guessing game when trying to figure out why your decider combinator will or won't "fire".

This is even more difficult when dealing with larger values like millions (m) or billions (g).

Merged some threads into this relatively old but still relevant subject

Related stuff

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=72901 Interface option to select digits of precision when abbreviating numbers
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=82475 Better readability for big numbers on tooltip

@Dark_Wynd
I moved that post into this subject, because it is very sure, that the way how numbers are displayed will not change. What I can think we can hope for is, that the number of relevant signatures is increased.

Or (and that is my favourite idea from this thread) that if you hover over any number, you will see the exact number in full precision as tooltip.

ssilk wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 03, 2021 9:16 am

Or (and that is my favourite idea from this thread) that if you hover over any number, you will see the exact number in full precision as tooltip.

Yes please!

Being able to see exact numbers would be great. Only way to see circuit numbers seems to be to do modulo 10 with circuits to extract a sequence of digits or use mods like Nixie tubes. And even Nixie tubes take a while to set up. And it only works for numbers on the circuit network, production graph numbers and other stuff aren't even available to the circuit network without more mods.